A component of a virtualization-software stack is the virtual machine manager (VMM) (or a hypervisor) that hosts guest virtual machines and multiplexes their requests to hardware devices located within an underlying host environment. The host environment could be an operating system or a run-time environment with device drivers for a physical platform. To emulate a hardware device as a virtual device, the VMM models the hardware interface of the hardware device (or for a complimentary hardware device), which may be performed with state machine logic in the VMM software and is referred to herein as a “device model.” As the virtual machine (VM) may need to exit to the VMM often to update the device model and (sometimes) communicate with the hardware interface, a processor core executing the VMM and the VM may undergo numerous transitions between the VMM and the VM, causing associated delays and becoming a costly drain on processing resources.